Mademoiselle Page 34

  Almost all of the original long-term residents of the Ritz had been evicted by the Germans, and almost no “foreigners” (now meaning French people) could gain entry. Hermann Göring, head of the occupied territories, was living at the hotel, as would, at various times, Albert Speer, Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Reich minister of the interior Wilhelm Frick. Aside from Chanel, only a handful of non-Nazi personnel enjoyed the privilege of living there—mostly supporters of the German cause. So how did Chanel get by the sentries and secure living quarters in what amounted to a very posh Nazi military barracks? It is overwhelmingly likely that Coco’s German and Vichy connections, possibly Pierre Laval himself, had intervened. Such solicitude toward his old friend seems entirely in character for Laval. According to Pierre Galante, when Laval—already deputy prime minister of Vichy—ran into Serge Lifar at a reception in Paris, he admonished Lifar: “Insofar as you have any influence in Paris, protect the Auvergnats, and above all Chanel.”

  In moving to her new, smaller quarters, Chanel needed to relinquish most of her furnishings, which remained in her original suite. This caused her no distress; she was not overly attached to things, no matter how rare or priceless. “Wealth is not accumulation; it is the opposite,” she told Claude Delay. There was one key exception: Chanel would not part with her Coromandels. Apel-les Fenosa had been outraged by the exorbitant prices of the screens, but their monetary value was not what Chanel prized. For her, the screens, with their painted flowers and exotic birds, conjured her love affair with Boy. Wherever she unfolded these large burnished wood panels, they instantly enfolded her in a cocoon of memories, obscuring whatever lay beyond. (In China, Coromandels had originally served as window coverings for royal ladies’ quarters, since they allowed light to filter in while blocking the stares of outsiders.) The screens transformed any new space into a replica of the much beloved long-ago apartment she shared with Capel on avenue Gabriel. Now, Coco folded up the Coromandels and moved them across the street to a small salon in her apartment above her atelier on rue Cambon. (She slept at the Ritz but entertained and dined on Cambon.) Like her itinerant peddler ancestors, Coco could essentially carry her home on her back, “like a snail,” as she herself acknowledged. After all, she had learned early to adapt quickly to dramatic shifts of environment. During the war, this fluid relationship to the concept of “home” emerged in Chanel’s highly mutable—not to say completely self-serving—notion of “home” in the national-political sense as well. Her allegiance, that is, turned out to be a function of purely personal expediency.

  Chanel had long enjoyed a deep and symbolic relationship with French nationalism; she represented the utmost in French style and luxury and stood at the helm of one of France’s most prestigious and lucrative commercial empires. But Chanel’s Frenchness had always exhibited a strain of self-interest and expediency—a sense that she celebrated her nationality as a substitute for family lineage or for noble birth. With the German takeover of her country, the cracks in Chanel’s patriotism began to show. The occupation engendered a thousand kinds of collaboration, most of which defy easy condemnation. But we now know that Chanel’s was not the everyday kind of collaboration born of desperation, confusion, or even passivity. On the contrary, Chanel proved such an enthusiastic fan of the Nazis that she “unfolded her screens” on their side of the street, joining the payroll as an agent for the Reich.

  It may not have been the first time she had played for the opposing team.

  The dossier labeled “Gabrielle Chanel” at the Archives de la préfecture de police de Paris is thick and dates back to 1923. In that year, Chanel’s relationship with Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov drew the attention of the authorities, who followed the couple closely in their travels throughout Europe. Although certain parts of the Chanel dossier contain some minor errors (in the spelling of names—including Chanel’s—and sometimes the nationalities of parties involved), it appears reliable overall. Some of its information conforms to what we know through other sources. Where the police surveillance file offers new information, as below, the precision of the surrounding details lends credibility to its claims. An entry stamped “secret” and dated June 23, 1923, uncovers the real and startling possibility that Chanel had actually worked as a German spy or informant during the First World War:

  The Ministry of War (Second Bureau of the General Staff, Central Intelligence Section) has just communicated to my administration the following information:

  We alert you to the suspicious activities of a certain Miss Tchannen [sic], a fashion designer from Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, who has been staying for a month in Paris at the Hotel Meurisse [sic], in the company of a Russian prince who calls himself a pretender to the throne of Russia.

  It seems that all of the couple’s expenses are being paid by Miss Tchannen, who is not known in Zurich to possess a great fortune. One thing is however certain: the presence of this woman is not without interest for Germany and the German service of Lucerne is following very closely her activity in Paris. It would be, it seems, of interest to monitor the activities of Miss Tchannen and to investigate the origin of the funds at her disposal.

  The Tchannen sisters worked, during the war, for the German Secret Service. I respectfully request that you perform close surveillance of the above-named Tchannen and of the person who is accompanying her and communicate to me the results of your investigation.

  The issuing authority for this document, the Central Intelligence Section (known in French as “SCR,” for Section de centralisation du renseignement), was a division devoted to counterespionage work in the wake of World War I. While Chanel does not seem ever to have made Zurich her permanent residence in the 1920s, she did, in fact, open a boutique there, specifically at number 39, Bahnhofstrasse, where it still stands today. She and Dmitri did, furthermore, occupy adjoining suites at Paris’s elegant Hôtel Le Meurice during this time, paid for entirely by Chanel, just as the report indicates. We also know that by the early 1920s, Dmitri had made common cause with members of Germany’s National Socialist party, including Hitler himself, drawn to them by their shared interest in defeating the Bolshevik Revolution. What’s more, Chanel’s passport for this period shows that she traveled to both Zurich and Berlin, most likely accompanying Dmitri. The accuracy of all other information in this document lends credence to the charge that the “Tchannen” sisters engaged in wartime work for Germany (although the “sister” in question might be Chanel’s aunt Adrienne).

  During World War I, Coco divided her time largely among Deauville, Biarritz, and Paris, often in the company of Boy Capel. Capel would never have abetted or encouraged any treacherous activity on Chanel’s part. But Boy was also an inconstant presence in her life, abandoning her for long stretches while he pursued his business interests, as well as his other romantic conquests. We don’t know why Chanel might have worked for the Germans in those early years of her career. Perhaps she sought to undermine Boy’s diplomatic war efforts, as revenge for his philandering? We do know that, during the Great War, when Coco was in her thirties, she was already more than influential enough to invite the interest of a foreign power looking to infiltrate the upper echelons of French society. And she already had a long history of feathering her own nest with whatever opportunity fate offered.

  More than twenty years later fate provided another opportunity for Chanel to try her hand at espionage, and in this case, the documentation is overwhelming and irrefutable. As so often happened, seismic political events filtered into her life via a lover—in this case, the Nazi officer Baron Hans Günther Von Dincklage, aka “Spatz.”

  The divorced Dincklage was tall, blond, athletic, and handsome—a former professional tennis player according to Chanel; a polo player according to other accounts. In 1940, he was forty-four, thirteen years younger than Chanel (although he likely believed her to be ten years younger than she was—a lie supported by the passport she’d doctored, and her own youthful looks). Descended of a noble German family o
n his father’s side and of an English mother, he was courtly, polished, and flirtatious. An accomplished polyglot, he spoke German, French, Spanish, and English fluently, and was apparently irresistible to women, with a long string of broken hearts in his wake. (Several accounts hint that he was especially adept in the bedroom.) According to Charles-Roux, Dincklage owed his curious sobriquet—Spatz, or “Sparrow”—to his extreme grace of manner—he was as light as a bird. Any inquiries about Dincklage usually drew from Coco the same two responses: “He was not German; his mother was English,” and/or “When a woman my age is lucky enough to find a lover, she can hardly ask to examine his passport!”

  Official biographies of Chanel continue to repeat—as does the Maison Chanel—that Mademoiselle had simply enjoyed the company of a dashing younger man and was completely unaware of his occupation. Some sources, including Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, claim that Coco had met Spatz twenty years before the war, in England, which is possible. Equally possible is that they had met in Paris, where Spatz had frequented elite social salons, or in the South of France, where he lived in the first half of the 1930s. He had gone to the Riviera to do more than play tennis.

  Dincklage had begun his career as a lieutenant in the German cavalry, fighting with other noblemen on the Russian front during World War I. He later joined the Freikorps, a paramilitary group of war veteran officers from whose ranks later emerged many leaders of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung) and SS (Schutzstaffel), including Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Composed largely of extreme right-wing anticommunists, the Freikorps was responsible, in 1919, for the murder of one of Germany’s most famous antiwar activists and Marxist thinkers, Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the Communist Party of Germany. Some sources suggest that Dincklage took part in that assassination. Other evidence points to his possible involvement in the 1934 joint assassinations of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou.

  Dincklage spent much of his long career as German agent number 8680F operating out of France (although also in Tunisia). In the early 1930s, Hans and his part-Jewish wife, Baroness Maximiliane von Dincklage, née von Schoenebeck (known as “Catsy”), lived largely on the Côte d’Azur, in Sanary-sur-Mer—a town with a substantial expatriate German colony. There they posed as a wealthy German wine merchant and his wife, while setting up a spy network to penetrate French naval secrets at the Toulon base nearby. Well-liked and charming, the couple socialized with the beau monde and recruited potential spies from among the French population.

  In 1935, Germany passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between “Germans” (meaning Aryans) and Jews. Just three months prior to the enactment of the laws, and after fifteen years of marriage, Spatz divorced his wife. Although born into an aristocratic and very wealthy family, Maximiliane was now branded a racially undesirable Jew and, as such, posed a serious threat to her husband’s career. Waiting until the last moment before the laws would take effect, the “sparrow” had flown lightly away in the nick of time. Despite this, Catsy and Spatz remained on friendly terms.

  Shortly after Dincklage’s divorce, French authorities exposed his identity as a Gestapo agent and a much-bruited article about him appeared in the journal Le Vendémiaire on September 4, 1935. His cover blown, Spatz fled and went into hiding in Switzerland. Catsy was less fortunate and was soon arrested as a foreign agent and interned in a French prison camp. In November 1939, the Swiss police picked Dincklage up in Bern and invited him to leave the country, which he did. He had kept himself out of prison but not out of the news. That same year, 1939, a right-wing journalist, Paul Allard, published a quickly high-profile book, When Hitler Spies on France, which named Dincklage as an agent of the Reich.

  Somehow, Allard procured classified German documents consisting of Dincklage’s correspondence with his superiors in Berlin. Most of Dincklage’s reports reproduced in Allard’s book concern themselves with appealing to “French taste” and “personality.” Allard found Dincklage perceptive and an excellent judge of character, and deemed his reports “models of psychological tactics … masterpieces of the genre.” He quoted large sections of them, showcasing Dincklage’s advice from the field on how best to win the hearts of French citizens:

  My many society friends in France have allowed me to form an ever-growing group of French sympathizers, which will allow me, I believe, to do my best in the tasks entrusted to me.… Our influence will only spread slowly, and we will not see … immediate results. I ask you for articles in the major French newspapers about the “bourgeois life” of the SS. It would be good to include photographs showing, for example, [Nazi officers] doing their marketing, to prove with this that the S.A. [officer] is not a savage, but a citizen.

  Unsurprisingly, given his famous romantic prowess, Dincklage had thought about how best to target French women: “I ask you once again for articles about … the German woman. They must be written in an accessible style … in French aimed at French women … articles likely to arouse the interest of the lady of the house in her German sister.”

  Rue de Rivoli during the occupation (illustration credit 11.7)

  By 1940, then, most French citizens who paid attention to current events would have heard something of the German spy and society hobnobber Hans von Dincklage—and that certainly includes the very well informed and socially connected Coco Chanel.

  None of this mattered when Spatz returned to Paris, ostensibly as an attaché working in textile production for the war. The city now belonged to him and his compatriots. In addition to the Ritz, nearly every major public structure boasted a swastika flag: the Eiffel Tower, the Garnier Opera House, and the stone arches lining the rue de Rivoli, where Misia and JoJo Sert still lived.

  In June 1942, a German officer approaches a young man and asks him, “Excuse me, sir, but where is the Place de l’Etoile?” The young man points to his left lapel.

  —PATRICK MODIANO, LA PLACE DE L’ETOILE

  “Le Juif et la France” (The Jew and France) poster for an exhibition devoted to “proving” how Jews had corrupted France (illustration credit 11.8)

  In September 1940 the so-called Jewish laws took effect, barring Jews from public office or other influential positions and forbidding them even to use public telephones. Thousands of Jewish businesses were seized; Jewish-owned art and property were repossessed, and, ultimately, nearly half of France’s Jewish population was deported to Nazi death camps.

  In March 1942, the Reich required all Jews in occupied France (including more than eighty thousand Parisians) to register with the police and identify themselves publicly by sewing to all their outer clothing a gold Star of David emblazoned with the word Juif. The “Jewish badge,” as it was known, did not indicate a religious truth so much as a presumed “racial” one. Jewish-born poet Max Jacob, for example, Cocteau’s and Picasso’s close friend, had converted to Catholicism more than thirty years earlier, but was required to wear one.

  Two Parisian women wearing Jewish stars, 1942 (illustration credit 11.9)

  Oddly, the Jewish badge and the Nazi swastika had much in common, or, rather, they were like mirror images of each other. Each was a graphic symbol that created instant political identity: one denoting undesirability, the other, superiority. Historian Régis Meyran has written of the Nazis’ “fantasy of total identification,” the belief that individuals can be grouped into vast and simplistic categories, which then justify any atrocity. This concept of “total identification” owes something to the world of fashion and its marketing—an arena in which the Nazis showed particular savvy. Nazis understood how to dress and label things, concepts, and people—how to carve the world up into inner and outer sanctums with brutal clarity.

  Chanel had always craved the inner sanctum, the right connections, access to the highest power. And she keenly understood how to conjure the same desire in others. Even Nazi soldiers, it turned out, were susceptible to Chanel’s talismanic double-C logo. German milit
ary men lined up daily at the Cambon boutique to buy perfume for their wives and girlfriends, drawn at least as much by the packaging as by the fragrance. When perfume supplies ran out, the soldiers took to stealing the empty display bottles off store shelves. Their uniforms might have boasted swastikas, but that did not stop the German solders in their pursuit of something—anything—stamped with that other mystical symbol: the double-C insignia.

  Just across from the boutique, Coco was ensconced in her new quarters at the Ritz. With a swastika adorning the hotel, living within its walls meant she had acceded yet again to the innermost sanctum, the new corridors of power. While Nazi soldiers eagerly sought out her label, Chanel showed equal eagerness to drape herself—metaphorically—with their swastika flag.

  The story of Chanel’s involvement with the Reich is dense and complicated, and she virtually never spoke of it. Although she lived in what amounted to a Gestapo barracks, Coco later insisted she never saw the Germans. But records exist documenting her surprisingly extensive connection to the Third Reich, and those who encountered her (including some who have kept silent until now) confirm Coco’s active support of many aspects of Nazi policy.

  We do not know how Chanel’s affair with Dincklage began. She might have first approached Spatz on her own, in an effort to liberate André from the German prison camp. Or she might have been introduced by someone—perhaps Pierre Laval. In either case, Coco and Spatz fell into a romance quickly at the Ritz, and to friends it seemed as though Spatz spent all his free time in Chanel’s suite at the hotel or across the street in the small apartment she kept above the Cambon studio.